“Will you?”

“Of course.”

He gave her a skeptical look, grabbing the tab when the waiter dropped it off. “My treat. I haven’t had tea and popovers in ages. I’d forgotten how good they are.”

“Owen?” She tried to keep her gaze on him but found she couldn’t. “About last night…”

“About Mattie, you mean?”

She heard the humor in his tone and scowled at him. “Very funny. I meant about-you know.”

“The fire in my woodstove. It was too damn hot.”

“You’re making fun of me, Owen Garrison, and if you think I’m going to sit here and take it, you can think again.” She finished the last of her popover, doused in butter and jam, and brushed off her fingers with her napkin, but he didn’t take the hint. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you? Okay. The kiss. I have no regrets.”

“I would hope not.” He smiled. “It was a damn good kiss.”

“We did get a bit carried away. As I said, I have no regrets, but it can’t happen again.”

“Why not?”

“You’re looking for distractions, I’m looking for distractions. I’m getting strange calls. MattieYoung’s acting weird. Doyle Alden’s in a sour mood. The Coopers are in the middle of an FBI background check that might not be as routine as they want us all to believe. Jason’s selling his brother’s house.” Abigail paused, catching her breath, wondering what her litany of goings-on was all about, why she’d rattled them off. “I can’t be sneaking kisses in the dark.”

“Hands off, then?”

She didn’t answer right away, which surprised her.

Owen seized on the delay. “Not as easy as you thought, is it? Abigail, we’ve been thinking about kissing each other for a long time. I know I thought about it that time I caught you in Austin pestering my grandmother. Last night was meant to happen.” He laid a few bills on the table and placed the check over them. “It’s going to happen again.”

“Not today,” she whispered, her chest clamping down on itself, until she thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

His eyes darkened, and he nodded. “No, not today.”

He had the grace to let her get out of there first. She picked up her pace, moving in a half run by the time she reached her car. She drove out to the entrance to the Park Loop Road and paid for a pass, joining a car from Colorado and an SUV from West Virginia on the quiet, scenic drive.

“Chris…don’t go. We can run errands another time.”

He touched her cheek. “I won’t be long.”

She smiled, falling back onto the couch in the front room. “Good. I’ll read for a little while and take a nap.”

“Yes.” He laughed, kissing her softly. “Rest up for later.”

After he left, she read a few pages and fell asleep, wishing he’d stayed with her.

The breathtaking, classic Maine coast beauty steadied her even as it conjured up memories, the whisper of long-ago kisses, the shudder of long-ago orgasms. She could see Chris’s eyes, as dark a green as the fir trees around her, as he’d watched her in the night.

To ease the pain, she would tell herself she was a different person now, but she wasn’t. Sure she’d changed-she didn’t know if Chris would recognize her anymore. She wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old law student who’d never endured serious loss, who’d never been called to a scene of a triple homicide or looked into the eyes of someone who’d killed in a fit of rage and now couldn’t go back and undo what he’d done. Yet with all she’d done in the past seven years, she wasn’t a different person. Deep down she was the same woman who’d fallen in love with her guy from Maine, her FBI agent.

He’d been her first proper lover, and he’d relished that role in their eighteen months together.

That their life together was over didn’t mean it had never happened.

Or that she needed to pretend that she didn’t want to fall in love again. It wouldn’t be the same-it couldn’t be the same. And it didn’t have to be.

She wanted it, she realized. She wanted to love a man, to be in love with a man-not out of desperation, not just to have someone in her life, but to let it happen if it was meant to, to be open to the possibility of it.

She made no stops on the winding drive.

When she arrived back at her house, the air was still, only the distant cries of seagulls to disturb the silence. Inside, she smelled plaster dust and the faint odor of fresh paint.

She dialed Lou Beeler’s pager. When he returned her call, she was in the back room, shaking open a black trash bag, standing up to her mid-calves in debris from her gutted walls. Any more frustrations, and she’d have all the walls in the house ripped out.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Lou said.

“Did you talk to Mattie Young?”

“I did. He wants to get a restraining order against you.”

Abigail snorted. “Let him try.”

“Doyle doesn’t have anything, either. Abigail-you know these calls could be B.S. You must have made your share of enemies over the past few years. One of them could have dug around on the Internet and figured out just enough to push your buttons.”

“Is that what you believe happened?”

“I don’t believe anything. I just follow the facts.” He paused. “So should you.”

She sat on a chair covered in white plaster dust. She’d meant to throw sheets over the furniture, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, she had a bigger mess to clean up-and Lou Beeler doubting her objectivity.

She didn’t blame him. In his place, she’d do no different.

She smiled to herself as she continued over the phone, “Does that mean I still have a green light to look into the calls myself?”

“As if you need a green light from me. You know what I’m saying, Abigail.”

“You’d like for me to go back to Boston.”

“Your caller could be there.”

“Or not,” she said.

Lou sighed. “Or not.”

“What about the FBI guys doing the background check on Grace Cooper?”

“What about them?”

“Come on, Lou. You know what I’m asking. Did you talk to them about the calls?”

“Yes.”

She waited, but he didn’t go on. “All right. I can take a hint.”

The Maine CID detective broke into laughter. “No, you can’t,” he said, still chuckling as he hung up.

Abigail scowled at the dead phone and debated driving out to the local police station and finding Doyle Alden, but what good would that do?

Instead, using an ancient dustpan and brush-and her hands-she swept up the chunks of plaster, bent nails, mice skeletons and yellowed drywall tape, shoving the debris into her heavy-duty trash bag.

She needed answers. But how could she get them with such an elusive caller? Without the law enforcement resources she usually had at her disposal?

“You’re the only person the killer fears.”

Was it true? If so, what leverage did it give her?

She could hardly breathe in the thick dust she’d stirred up. She tied up the overstuffed bag and dragged it out to the back porch, down the steps and around to the side of the house, coughing as she shoved it into the garbage bin.

She knew what she had to do.

Before she could change her mind, she ran back into the house and grabbed the phone, dialing her father’s private number.

“Abigail,” he said when he picked up. “I thought you might call. Where are you?”

She was sure he knew where she was. “Maine,” she said.

He took an audible breath. She pictured him in his office or in his car, taking her call because he was between meetings. He was a busy man with an important, high-pressure job, but he was like any father with a daughter whose life had taken a hairpin turn from what he’d wanted for her.

John March had started out as a Boston cop. Bob O’Reilly remembered him and said they’d all known-even the rookies like him-that her father wouldn’t stay in uniform. He had drive, ambition and a willingness to sacrifice. He’d gone to law school, joined the FBI, moved his family from one city to another as he worked his way to the top. He was fifty-nine, handsome and unstoppable. He was also absolutely convinced that no one would ever crack the only unsolved murder of one of his own-FBI Special Agent Christopher Browning.